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Does anyone have experience with Scrivener, a word processing software from Literature & Latte, either for Windows or OS X? I was looking at it today and wondering if it may work better than Word for writing research papers. I like the idea of the corkboard and index cards since I'm always rearranging things in my papers so they flow smoother. The outliner sounds useful, too. They offer a 30-day trial, but would like opinions of actual users I (sort of) know.

Best I can say is that I've heard of it.
Sorry I don't have more info, post-grad hasn't really been my thing.

--Patrick

I tried it for my first novel, but I went back to word pretty quickly. It was pretty bare bones back then, and I didn't find the few features it had very helpful. I also found it difficult to merge all of the native RTF files into one document when it came time to publish.

That said, it looks like it's come a long way since then. I might have to give it another shot.

We write all of our research articles in Word. Some folks like LaTeX. I tried it, but I wasn't willing to deal with the learning curve when I was on a deadline. For your References, I like Mendeley (it's free). I have used Papers, Endnote, and Zotero. They all have some good and bad. Zotero is free. The other two cost. Your school might have distro licenses for Endnote.

What you might need to consider is what format your PI uses, and just use what they do. That'll save some formatting and style headaches.

Let me know if you need more info about setting that stuff up.

I do use LaTeX and it's wonderful. Particularly for long documents (like the thesis I'm writing right now) or anything with many references.
But its nice things are references, crossreferences, and formatting, no help at all with organizing ideas, restructuring etc. I do that on paper sometimes...

PS.: Totally worth it to learn it for a thesis, in my opinion.

I use Scrivener all the time and I love it. It's made for setting up stuff like chapters and scenes, and is perfect for adding notes about whatever world or characters you have. It's made for outlining and is very well suited to both novels and screenplays.

Most of the SERIOUS folks I know swear by LaTeX, but there is a huuuge learning curve.
It's less a text editor and more a tool for graphically programming your document. This allows for incredibly fine-grained control over how your final document will look.
In other words, it's extremely worthwhile to learn if you think you will be constructing a lot of documents over your career.

--Patrick

Yes. It is extremely feature-laden now, too. I like it but don't use it enough. I would say it is good for intensive solo projects (like writing a novel, but not just that.) It is not so good for collaborative writing unless your collaborators also use it, though. I use Google docs for a lot of shorter, shared pieces now. I do think it is impressive software but with somewhat niche usefulness.

Sounds like it's at least worth downloading the trial then.

I think I tried Zotero as an add-on to either Chrome or Firefox. I don't remember what happened, but at the time something about it aggravated me. I think the APA style formatting was wrong, so I had to redo all of the references or something like that. It's been a couple of years and many papers ago.